Little Things That Count: Copying Names in Management Studio
This post is about a really little detail that isn’t a big deal.
SQL 2008 Agent Jobs - Tokens work in PowerShell!
I have been working away building out servers in our new prod test environment, and automating as much as possible along the way with PowerShell. I have to say that it’s been really fun and PoSH has brought back that loving feeling that I always had for Perl. If a programming language can be friendly, PowerShell manages it.
Automating SQL Local Security Policy Rights: PoSH and NTRights
There are a couple of local security policy rights that are not granted by default in SQL Server setup that I’ve been setting manually for a few years now:
Are you Slipstreaming? The Very Best Way to Install SQL Server!
Somehow, I didn’t know about slipstreaming installations of SQL Server until last week. I heard about them at SQLPASS in Allan Hirt’s session on installing SQL Server 2008 on Windows 2008 clusters.
SQLPASS Day 2- Optimization Timeouts and All about TLogs
SQLPass unfortunately can’t last forever, but happily it’s still going strong. Here’s some highlights from my Day #2.
SQL PASS Day 1: To Free or Not To Free the Proc Cache?
Yesterday was day 1 of SQL PASS 2009. I am attending a variety of sessions on execution plans this year, and along the way I heard three very different opinions yesterday on managing the procedure cache in presentations.
The Case of the Undroppable Database
Once Upon A Time there was an Orphan Database…
I needed to drop a formerly-logshipped database on our warm standby server. When attempting to drop it, I found that it failed because it was a logshipped database from a replication publisher. Hmm.
Who is using space in tempdb, and what is their execution plan?
Sometimes tempdb is filling up. Sometimes I just want to monitor the amount of tempdb and check out execution plans of heavy tempdb users while watching performance on a server.
Troubleshooting 1.00.002: Never forget the Windows Event Log!
This evening during some maintenance I was reminded of one very important rule: when looking into any issue on a windows server, never forget to check the Windows Event Log.
Using Last Backup Date to Switch Between Full and Differential Backups
Today I was glancing at once of my servers and noticed the backup job was running later than normal. I haven’t been working with this server for long, so I glanced to check where the backup was writing to and checked the output directory. I found that a differential backup was being written, and that the differential backup from the day before was much larger than normal.